Firm or Fickle? Evaluating Large Language Models Consistency in Sequential Interactions
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various tasks, but their deployment in high-stake domains requires consistent and coherent behavior across multiple rounds of user interaction.This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating and improving LLM response consistency, making three key contributions 1 .First, we introduce Position-Weighted Consistency (PWC), a metric designed to capture both the importance of early-stage stability and recovery patterns in multi-turn interactions.Second, we present MT-Consistency, a carefully curated benchmark dataset spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels, specifically designed to evaluate LLM consistency under various challenging follow-up scenarios.Third, we introduce Confidence-Aware Response Generation (CARG), a framework that significantly improves response stability by explicitly integrating internal model confidence scores during the generation process.Experimental results demonstrate that CARG significantly improves response stability without sacrificing accuracy, offering a practical path toward more dependable LLM behavior in critical, real-world deployments.
Authors
- Xueying Ding (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6338-6068)
- Yinbin Miao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3128-4275)
- Rema Padman (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4250-4357)
- Ramayya Krishnan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9935-2468)
- Yubo Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0037-1528)
Institutions
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
Publication Details
- Published
- 2025-01-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.347
- Citations
- 3
- Primary Topic
- Topic Modeling
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 7.44